An east-west city wall built by Suleiman the Magnificent in the 16th century cuts a jagged, horizontal line across the bottom of this photo; from our vantage point in the north, we look south beyond this wall to the Old City, the golden-domed Mosque of Omar and the undulating Judean Hills on the horizon.

But about 500 yards north of Suleimans wall, just below the structures at the bottom of this photo, archaeologists have excavated another wall, called the Sukenik-Mayer wall, after its earliest excavators. Some scholars say that this 800-yard-long line of masonry is Josephuss Third Wall, built by Agrippa I to enclose a first-century A.D. Jerusalem suburb. But other scholars disagree. The late Kathleen Kenyon argued that the Roman general Titus built the Sukenik-Mayer wall in the first century A.D. to trap the citys Jewish defenders. E. W. Hamrick counters that the wall was built by the Jewish defenders just before Tituss victory in 70 A.D. Others have proposed that Bar Kokhbas warriors built the Sukenik-Mayer wall in 132135 A.D. to thwart the Roman army in the second great Jewish revolt against Rome.